Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States from 1492 to the Present is universally known as one of the most influential, if not the best or most historically sound social history of the United States. Zinn is one of the most famous examples of a kind of historian that was born of a particular moment in American history. Although it was originally published in 1980 it symbolizes the fervor and excitement of the 1960s of the counterculture, the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. Zinn’s book is deeply steeped in these movements and their social implications. Social history is often a history not of people but of those movements and what made them necessary to make positive changes to American society. Zinn in writing this book attempts to elicit in the reader a response by trying “to awaken a greater consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance.” (Zinn, 2003, p.668) While questioning and directly interrogating the contours of American history for its inequities that would ultimately form movements is a worthwhile endeavor it is much a much harder to actually prove that these injustices were actually overcome. Zinn’s exploration of the civil rights movement and the so-called “socialist challenge” are particularly good avenues to investigate the shortcomings of Zinn’s arguments.
American history is if anything open to interpretation and reinterpretation and Howard Zinn along with his peers such as William Appleman Williams, Staughton Lynd and Eugene Genovese were the forefathers of a new school of so-called “radical history” which questioned the given interpretation and sought to use new methods of inquiry and categories of identity to their historical writing. This included a rejection of a kind of Whig history that valued liberalism and the role of individual rights as tantamount in the development of American history. The new historians tended to question these interpretations and aimed at asking new questions about the development of the United States and its society. These historians which Zinn was among questioned the role imperialism, racism, gender history and opposition to capitalism as key points to investigate in the development of American history. This school of history shunned the idea of objectivity and pursued their research in argumentative and adversarial tone. To them history wasn’t just descriptive it actually could be something that could change people’s minds. That is the context in which Zinn wrote the People’s History of the United States one that was highly steeped in the politics of the 1960s and openly advocated for history’s role as a political act and as part of a movement.
Howard Zinn’s focus on the civil rights movement if the 1950s and 1960s doesn’t focus nearly as much on the narrative of incrementalist and slow progress of many traditional telling of this period of American history. Instead, Zinn focuses on how the US government responded to pressures that a new spirit of racial consciousness and militarism for a new era in the relationship between the black minority both in the South and the big cities of the North. The Civil Rights movement represented a revolt, a mostly non-violent one, from Black Americans against the power structures of American society and politics. Although non-violent protest was the hallmark of the movement early on by the late 1960s SNCC, Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party had changed the emphasis to at least a much violent rhetoric if not exactly actual armed revolution.
The Civil Rights movement was largely shaped in its early years by the US government’s worries that the institutional racism was actually a direct hindrance to the United States in fighting the battle for the Third World countries during the Cold War. These considerations were massive and it actually led President Truman in the early post-War years to push an agenda which
Recommended that the civil rights section of the Department of Justice be expanded, that there be a permanent Commission on Civil Rights, that Congress pass laws against lynching and to stop voting discrimination, and suggested new laws to end racial discrimination in jobs. (Zinn, 2003, p. 415)
This early part of the Civil Rights movement was marked not by any kind of agitation by the people of the South but instead by direct action by the federal government. Although there is much to talk of the unfolding of the Civil Rights movement in the South, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Martin Luther King’s non-violent movement Zinn instead focuses on the later period where there was reaction to what seemed to be a lot of empty progress. (Zinn, 2003, p. 417)
Zinn instead focuses on a later manifestation of the Civil Rights movement which although it recognized the achievements of Martin Luther King Jr and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference which had gained many advancements in civil rights. These included the end of overt segregation and the protection of voting rights. These were improvements but it did not fix the many problems of African Americans in the urban north. There seemed a turning in the feeling of many young black people, one such man, a Julius Lester summed everything up perfectly. He said that the time was over, that “the days of singing freedom songs and the days of combating bullets and hilly clubs with love” was over and he added “love is gentle and fragile and seeks a like response.” (Zinn, 2003, p.427) This new feeling expressed by the more radical members of SNCC, Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party was popularized in the era of urban tumult where blacks all over the country finally had enough of the hopelessness and they like Aldous Huxley famously said realized that “Liberties are not given, they are taken.” (Zinn, 2003, p. 429) They would be willing to do this in the words of Malcolm X “by any means necessary.”
Zinn’s preoccupation with movements that are openly against the mainstream of American political and historical highlights the way he thinks about history and highly informed his writing of The People’s History of the United States. Much like in the discussion above on Civil Rights, Zinn’s focus on chapter focusing on what he calls the “Socialist Challenge” doesn’t focus on the work of progressive politicians who were able to make incremental change or of the American Federation of Labor which he doesn’t consider enough of a mass movement instead he focused on the work of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and how they were able to actually to be resist although their successes are hardly unequivocal.
This chapter of the People’s History is one of the most complex one because it proves that there is a limit to having a certain method or narrative and having to fit the facts. Zinn’s discussion of the AFL and Samuel Gompers underlines that all history can’t be everything to all people. Zinn criticizes the AFL for not being a large enough union or inclusive enough for not having unskilled workers, women or people of color in their ranks. (Zinn, , p.305) Instead of just reporting the facts Zinn has a narrative to pursue which actually undercuts the effectiveness of the historical analysis. This is also the case when the IWW is discussed but in opposite terms
Zinn’s enthusiasm for his kind of historical method underlines a belief that success is not the necessary goal but instead a changing of consciousness. To prove this he cites the IWW who despite never having more than five or ten thousand members at any one time they represent a particular a vision of history, he claims that the Wobblies spirit, their ability organize and to spread a message “made them an influence on the country far beyond their numbers.” (Zinn, 2003, p. 308) This might look nice on paper and it is certainly an inspiring message but ultimately even with all of the evidence he provides doesn’t seem to actually make his point. Zinn’s inspiration is logical he wants to write about movements that had an impact whether that is a good idea seems like a much harder question to actually answer.
Zinn’s mission in his book is to investigate American history from another angle to give voice to those who have no voice. To use a term to give the subaltern and oppressed voices of American society a say in a history that was always shaped by elites and their particular vision of history. A People’s History is a chronicle of many different movements that arose in the course of American history that asked for more equality and better treatment for society at large. In this sense this book is valuable and interesting because it informs what could be for some people a version of American history that has elided purposefully or by mistake. Zinn’s particular historiographical bent is also typical of a kind of radical vision of American history shaped by the counterculture and the New Left and the tumult of the 1960s. This alone makes this a valuable vision of history that has validity and merit.
I would say that by in large I would say that I learned a lot from this book and that at least it has made me aware of some of the less talked about issues in American history and that I will use this knowledge in my future learning and historical discussions. There is something to be said for hearing non-conformist voices and Zinn in this book built an effective narrative of social, racial, political and labor history that value for anyone interested in building a deeper knowledge of American history and how social movements have shaped the country’s development especially in the twentieth century.
Reference
Zinn, H. (2003). A people's history of the United States: 1492-2001.
